Friday, September 29, 2017

Sexual abuse is an issue that pits the public against
the criminal justice system (and related professionals) like no other. There is
a prevailing public view that offenders in general, and sexual offenders in
particular, are not sufficiently punished for the crimes that they commit, that
they do not get long enough sentences and that treatment/rehabilitation is a
waste of resource (The
Sun; Channel
4). The general public at times can be moved to taking action themselves in
lieu or in spite of the work of professional organizations; which is what has
happened in the UK over the last 10 years with the increase of community action
and against suspected or known child sexual offenders (BBC). The consequence of this is the establishment of
“pedophile hunter” community groups (Channel 4).
These are groups of people who go online and pretend to be children or other pedophiles
in the hope of snaring other child sexual offenders. A lot of the volunteers in
these organizations say that they are doing it because the police and the
criminal justice system cannot be relied upon, with many of them coming from
areas or social inequality and vulnerability. These groups argue that they are
doing what they are to aid the police in protecting children and catching
potential or known offenders. However, as we know, it is never that
straightforward or one dimensional.

Previous discussions regarding pedophile hunter groups
highlight emphasis their inherent problems for the system, in that they can
Increase the risk from potential [or active] offenders, the potential harm to
themselves as well as the fact that they maybe jeopardizing the cases that they
are investigating, potentially resulting in the cases bring thrown out of
courts. A colleague of ours observed
what many miss. She works outside of our field, primarily in the field of
treating combat veterans and road accident victims. Her response was, “Why
aren’t we just helping people?” The world needs more of this kind of
unvarnished truth-telling.

In the present situation, there is juxtaposition in
the debate: these communities do not like or want the police in their
communities and feel that they are better able to handle the issue with their
own brand of justice. There was some work done by NIACRO in Northern Ireland a
few years ago (Base 2) where they worked with paramilitary organizations to get
them to stop targeting sexual offenders because of the impact that it was
having on the communities in question and the victims (McLean
& Maxwell). The issue is that while we may balk at the ethic, morality
and consequences of this vigilante action the communities themselves see it as
being fit for purpose and know the courts and the police are starting to soften
their attitudes. Over the last three years there has been an increase in the
use of evidence from these groups in court 20 out of 176 cases in
2014, 77 out of 256 cases in 2015 and 114 out of 259 cases in 2016 (BBC). Which has lead
Chief
Constable Simon Bailey, the national lead for child protection at the National
Police Chiefs' Council has stated that the Police may have to work with these
groups to prevent and catch child sexual abusers (BBC). This is a
problematic statement because in the same breath he is stating that these
groups are putting themselves, communities and children at risk.This is not the first time Simon Bailey has
caused controversy in his statements around sex offender management for in
March 2017 he suggested that internet only offenders should not be prosecuted (The Telegraph). The
driving force behind his belief that internet only sex offenders should not be
prosecuted was access to resources, finances and time for the police to deal
with the volume of offences and offenders; it would not be beyond the realms of
possibility to see that resources would be a driving force in working with
pedophile hunters. The main issue is that there is growing interest and support
for working with pedophile hunters from the courts, media and professionals; however, if you really want to engage
communities and aid them in reporting and preventing child sexual abuse is this
really the best method? We should be engaging with communities around
education, around safeguarding and around child protection. We should be
encouraging communities to work with the police and representatives of the
state, to give these professionals information and allow them to do their jobs
effectively. What we don’t want is people taking the law into their own hands
and causing untold harm (Death of a man confronted by pedophile
hunters in Northern Ireland).

On one hand, citizens throughout history
have tipped off the police to wrongdoing. On the other hand, entrapment can be
an abuse of police power. When even the Chief Constable believes this to be a
problem, however, it’s time for society to take a closer look at its response
not only to crime, but to sexual attraction to children. At what point do we
give police the tools to do their job as ethically as possible and set limits
on vigilantism? And how can we as citizens do more to aid efforts in prevention
and treatment? At what point do we look at efforts such as Project Dunkelfeld
and other prevention-focused organizations, figure out what works best about
them, and move forward? At what point do we accept decades of scientific
findings and conclude that punishment-only responses might be effective at
punishment, but not at prevention?

Monday, September 25, 2017

The annual NOTA conference
took place from the 20th – 22nd September in Cardiff. The
conference was a real mix of research, practice and engagement with colleagues
from across the UK, Ireland and internationally (with attendees and speakers
from a range of countries including the USA, Sweden and Spain). In this blog I
am going to take you on a whistle stop tour of the event.

The 2017 plenaries combined research, practice and innovate approaches from a
very international group of speakers. The conference started on the Wednesday with
two keynotes addressing sex offender treatment, there was a discussion around
the sex offender treatment evidence base and how it links to the effectiveness of
treatment outcomes (Friedrich Losel) followed by an overview of the current
state of sex offender treatment programs it the UK, with special reference to
the development and roll out of Horizon and Kaizen (Mark Farmer). These
keynotes offered us the opportunity to really reflect and consider the evidence
base of sex offender treatment and how it fits into ideas around desistence,
management and public protection. The second day of conference (Thursday) had
keynotes that talked to current research and practice in Wales with young
people who have committed sexual offences (Sharron Wareham & Sophie
Hallett) as well as presentation of how sexual abuse is a public health issue,
and how sexual abuse ties into the wider public health literature and debates (Emily
Rotherman). These keynotes really emphasized the need to reframe and reconsider
sexual abuse as an issue as well as the groups/sub-groups of perpetrators that
it encompasses in a non-criminogenic/criminal justice only light; therefore by
thinking in a health and life course informed way we can open up the range of debates
and resources available to us. The last day of the conference (Friday) started
with a really informative keynote on developments around the assessment of risk
in Child Sexual Exploitation (Sarah Brown & Phil Ashford), which is
important given the confluence of child sexual abuse, neglect and exploitation that
exists (especially in frontline criminal justice) and needs to be better
understood as well as streamlined. The closing plenary was on sexual, physical
and psychological abuse in sport (Mike Harthill & Melanie Lang) which was particularly
informative as it guided discussion around what was already available, what has
been done previously and the impact of historical allegations on sport; which
was useful for a NOTA audience that may not have been aware of all of the
policies and practices in place. All of these plenaries really enforced the
need for us to pull together what resources, tools and evidence that we have in
accessible and fit for purpose way to be able to prevent as well as respond to
sexual abuse.

In addition to the traditional conference activities NOTA 2017 also had a public engagement event. Unfortunately, as
with NOTA 2016, the public engagement event did not have many members of
the public, a real learning point and a debate for the conference planning as
well as prevention committee in planning for NOTA 2018,but instead welcomed 30+
conference attendees and local stakeholders to discuss how we can prevent Child
Sexual Abuse. The session heard from national (Ceri Evans, Jon Brown, Claire
Short & Kieran McCartan) and international (Emily Rothman & Maia
Christopher) speakers about the work that they were involved with in preventing
child sexual abuse and their ideas for where NOTA and professionals in this
arena go next.

Also, NOTA 2017 acted
as an opportunity to celebrate the work of Professor Anthony Beech who has made
a long term, substantial and significant contribution to the sexual abuse field
internationally, who is retiring this year.

NOTA 2017 fitted a massive amount of material in across three days, which left
me informed, refreshed and looking forward to next year’s meeting in Glasgow
(19th – 21st September 2018).

Research on campus sexual assault (CSA) has almost exclusively drawn on self-report data, examined undergraduates (i.e., students aged 18-24), and focused on female victimization. The few studies which included male CSA victims generally had fewer than 100 male subjects, which makes important statistical analyses difficult. To build upon prior literature and expand knowledge on male CSA victimization, we analyzed more than 5,000 incidents of CSA that were reported to police from across the United States using National Incident-Based Reporting System data (NIBRS; 1993-2014). We expanded victim age ranges to include those 17 to 32 years old and investigated more male CSA victimizations than prior work to date, approximately 350 incidents. Comparisons of male victim versus female victim CSA incidents, estimated via multivariate logistic regression, revealed several important patterns. Although both male and female victims were approximately 19 years old on average, perpetrators who assaulted females tended to be 23 years old while those assaulting males were on average 29. While 1% of CSA perpetrators offending against female victims were themselves female, 17% of perpetrators offending against male victims were female. Finally, CSA incidents with male victims were more likely to include multiple offenders, but less likely to involve stranger or Black perpetrators and also less likely to result in injuries relative to CSA incidents with female victims. Implications are discussed in terms of policing practices, and we pose new questions to the field regarding the study and prevention of CSA.

Could you talk us through where the idea for the research came from?

The idea for this project emerged from two recent events. The first was a high-profile sexual assault from 2015 that was reported broadly in the press. In brief, a student at an Ivy League school was convicted of three felony counts of sexual assault committed against an intoxicated and unconscious female student on campus. Two courageous and fast thinking graduate students stopped the assault, apprehended the perpetrator, and then held him as they waited for law enforcement. Knowing we had published on sexual assault, friends and colleagues asked us whether this type of sexual assault was rare or common on college campuses. In short, we did not know the answer. Although the victimization of college students is frequently studied, we noted only a small number of studies had isolated and focused on the campus setting itself in relation to sexual assault.

The second event was a realization which came from casual conversations we had with other researchers. Some colleagues mentioned they had uncovered a substantial number of female offenders in their studies of campus sexual assault (CSA). However, each researcher also said something akin to “but we never reported those findings.” One reason for their omission(s) was that this finding was atypical (i.e., no other study had reported such a pattern) so each presumed it must be a statistical anomaly. There was also concern that emphasizing female CSA offenders in reports could distract policymakers from male-on-female sexual assaults or even lead to backlash (i.e., given society’s resistance to recognize that females do sexually offend). However, because we had heard this from multiple researchers, we were in a unique position to realize that this likely was not an anomaly at all.

We pondered and discussed these two distinct events while working on other projects. After seeing the call for the special issue in Sexual Abuse about institutions in relation to sexual assault, we knew we had a great opportunity to move beyond discussion and really dig in on CSA by focusing on the campus location itself. We used the National Incident-Based Reporting System data (also referred to as the “NIBRS”) for a few reasons: (a) it had a clean measure of location, college and university, (b) it drew data from a large number of states and over many years, and (c) it had a relatively large sample size to use. We then contacted Michael Rocque, a fellow colleague, who had some experience thinking about crime within school contexts. He agreed to join the project. This led us to our next challenge: designing the study itself.

What kinds of challenges did you face throughout the process?

In regard to the research process, we wanted to ensure that we had strong logical arguments that supported using the NIBRS data. Given that most sexual assault is vastly underreported, and that the NIBRS data are based on police reports, we had to think through how the NIBRS data added to the discussion on CSA. Ultimately, we decided it had unique strengths, such as the ability to speak directly to a subset of cases that law enforcement and university officials would respond to.

A related challenge with the NIBRS was that although we wanted to explore different university roles (e.g., student, teaching assistant, professor, coach) in relation to CSA, we could not. While the NIBRS data provide more than 20 victim-offender relationships, our “ideal” relationships were not included. Therefore, we began to shift toward age as inherently interesting and also, perhaps, a proxy for these other roles. Hence, we did a lot of investigating in regard to college populations (e.g., graduate and undergraduate) and how they have changed over time (e.g., sociodemographics, like minimum and maximum age of entry into college, average age of graduate students, and so on). We also investigated retirement age for faculty. This research on age was an important facet that laid the groundwork for the study. With that said, we knew we had to be inherently mindful about our language-use in the manuscript to ensure we did not suggest age reflected roles and relationships that we simply could not measure and analyze.

We also faced challenges that many other collaborators face. Two of us work in academia and the other in federal law enforcement. Given our different obligations and workloads, many drafts were shared over evenings and weekends. We also have three unique perspectives that span from translational criminology to sociology of law to criminological theory and neuroscience. We debated language often and constantly re-wrote each other’s work. This was a challenge, but also a strength. It maximized the number of ideas both analytically and in terms of communicating those ideas in a way each other could understand.

What do you believe to be to be the main things that you have learnt about campus sexual assault?

Our study specifically examined differences between male and female victims of CSA. For a variety of reasons, CSA studies have focused almost exclusively on female victims. In addition, most previous research has used survey approaches, given the known underreporting with sexual assault in general and even more so on college campuses. Our use of the NIBRS over an extended period of time allowed us to obtain a sizeable sample of events to specifically compare males to females. This comparison research had rarely been done due to small sample sizes of male victims of CSA.

We learned that when males were victims in CSA incidents, they were more likely to be victimized by older perpetrators. Given the focus on undergraduates and sexual victimization, our expanded age range made it possible to see, that at least for reported incidents of CSA against male victims, while on average male victims were 19-years-old, perpetrators were on average 10 years older. Although female victims were also on average 19-years-old, their offenders were on average only a few years older. In addition, we found that while males were the most likely perpetrator of both males and female victims in CSA incidents, females were the perpetrators of male victims 17% of the time.

So, given our conversations with other colleagues about female perpetrators of CSA, these findings in particular were something important that we learned and could disseminate to academics, law enforcement, school administrators, and the like.

Another important thing we learned, or had reinforced, was that it is really important to identify and then challenge methodological or theoretical assumptions pervasive in a field of study. We learned a great deal, and offered new facts and puzzles to the field, because of the inclusion of male victims, female offenders, and considering those below age 18 and above age 22.

Now that you’ve published the article, what are some implications for practitioners?

We believe an implication of our work is that school officials need to recognize that males are victims of sexual assault a non-trivial amount of time. Since our data relied on reported events, it is likely that there are even more unreported male victims that are in need of attention. Prevention and response programming on campuses need to ensure that prevention services are targeted toward female victims and male perpetrators, but also targeted toward male victims and female offenders.

Second, practitioners need to pay attention to the differences in CSA between female and male victims, including age of perpetrator--that the average age for the perpetrators of male victims was 29 indicates there may be a different sort of relationship than the standard party/hook up culture that has been the focus of much work on CSA. In addition, a non-trivial percentage of males were victimized by females, which is an overlooked area of potential intervention.

Thursday, September 7, 2017

Many of us recall the confusion
of early attempts to prevent, treat, resolve, and grow beyond the harm of sexual
violence. Early observations that there was “no cure” for sexual violence often
led to misunderstanding rather than deeper knowledge about assessing, treating,
and preventing it. Over time, many of us worked tirelessly to remind the world
that the act of sexual abuse is a behaviour that can be changed and not simply
an incurable disorder; at the individual level, our clients are human beings
who change over time and not simply immutable monsters. At street level, the
“no-cure language” has changed in statutes. However, the search for the
societal ills that result in violence continue – and yes, at that level of
abstraction, many believe there is a cure. Many organizations have championed
efforts at reducing sexual violence; this blog focuses on one that is seeking
to prevent all violence.

Recently, Kieran travelled to the
University of Illinois at Chicago and met with staff from the Cure
Violence program. The idea behind Cure Violence is that the world has been
looking at the idea of violence from a problematic perspective for many years,
and that we can prevent – and not just respond to – violence. The Cure Violence
program has operated for over fifteen years and across nine different
countries. Traditional responses to violence are rooted in notions of criminal
justice, with a punitive and reactive response; communities punish and
rehabilitate violent offenders after the fact. Therefore, you need to become a
perpetrator of violence, have a victim, and be involved with the criminal
justice system in some capacity before you can learn how to prevent future
violent acts. People who perpetrate sexual abuse commonly experience this,
despite the emergence of support groups and organizations whose mission is to
help those who are afraid that abuse may occur and are seeking help.

The Cure Violence program,
however, looks at violence from a more holistic perspective, stating that society
needs to view violence as a health issue and that we can use a public health
approach to respond to it. The core idea underlying the program is that
violence operates like an epidemic: it spreads across neighbours (through
social learning) infecting people socially, psychologically, and culturally,
resulting in more violence. Thus, violence inevitably begets more violence,
even though the risk factors and context in which they exist can change from
one person to the next. Although the program originally focused on intercity
gang violence, it can be used to discuss and think about various forms of violence,
including sexual violence. Through the work of staff in Cure Violence the cycle
and spread of violence can be interpreted and, therefore, stopped, by:

-Detecting and interrupting potentially violent
conflicts

The program
employs violence interrupters to work within vulnerable communities, to help
identify and provide early intervention to sources of violence. These
interrupters have to have credibility within the communities that they work in
and be seen as a legitimate resources by the at risk populations, because they
come from these communities and have histories of violence themselves as
perpetrators or victims. The interrupters work to defuse the situation and
refer the community members onto other organisations that can help support them
in a more bespoke and appropriate, way.

-Identify and treat individuals at the highest
risk

Outreach workers
help support the vulnerable community by offering them ongoing and appropriate
support. The aim of this part of the program is to work with the people who are
at the highest risk of committing violence and offer then support in making
better long term life choices that do not involve violence.

-Mobilise communities to change norms

The program works
with all levels of community members in the communities that it works within to
enable social change so that the community as a whole rejects violence;
suggesting that there are other means of conflict resolution and new, adaptive
ways of moving forward.

The Cure Violence program provides
insight into preventing sexual violence; it provides a model and way of
thinking/working in this arena. There are differences between sexual and other
forms of violence, but this program offers us adaptability rather than roadblocks.
Reflecting on the Cure Violence program and how it relates to sexual violence:

-Victims of violence and victims of sexual
violence often suffer from similar psychology, emotional, social, health, economic
and life course challenges as a consequence;

-Often times sexual violence is lumped together
in communities with high levels of social, political, and health
vulnerabilities (such as other forms of violence);

-There is often a relationship between being a
victim of general violence and being a victim of sexual violence. This can
often be endemic in communities, families, peer groups and geographical areas;

-Some perpetrators of sexual violence have been
victims of sexual violence themselves previously, as well as other forms of
violence and abuse;

-There is a growing recognition that sexual
violence, like other forms of violence, occurs within community structures
(i.e., sports clubs, communities, gangs, networks, etc.). Therefore,
understanding how to respond to affected communities in an appropriate way becomes
all the more urgent;

-Sexual abuse, like other types of violence, can
be prevented;

-We need to understand and honour the voices of
both those who perpetrate and are victimised by sexual violence so that we can
develop better resources to stop sexual violence before it happens (we see this
in the prevention of sexual violence re-offending, but we need to move it
further out into society); affected communities can be leaders in this area.

-We need better support and awareness for at-risk
communities so that sexual violence can be prevented;

-We need to develop better resources, means and
mechanisms for engaging communities in changing social norms around=d sexual
violence. We have started to do this over the past 10 years but we need to get
better at it and learning from an equivalent program would enable us to do
that.

Cure Violence asks us to
reconceptualise the reality of violence, and therefore how we can best respond
to it. Some organizations are starting to do this with sexual violence, taking
a preventive, public health approach and it seems that the Cure Violence
program may help just on our path to achieving it.

Kieran McCartan, PhD

Chief Blogger

David Prescott, LICSW

Associate blogger

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The Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (http://atsa.com/) is an international, multi-disciplinary organization dedicated to preventing sexual abuse. Through research, education, and shared learning ATSA promotes evidence based practice, public policy and community strategies that lead to the effective assessment, treatment and management of individuals who have sexually abused or are risk to abuse.

The views expressed on this blog are of the bloggers and are not necessarily those of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research & Treatment, or Sage Journals.

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